For home theaters, personal listening systems, recording studios, and other sound systems, signal processing plays a critical role. Among many signal processing techniques, equalization is commonly used to alter the amount of energy allocated in different frequency bands to make a sound more sensational, or to render said sound with new properties. When a sound engineer sets up a sound system, the system as a whole is commonly equalized in frequency domain to compensate for equipment distortion, room acoustics, and most importantly a listener's preference. Therefore, equalization is a listener-dependent task, and the best equalization relies on adaptive and intelligent individualization. Similarly, spatial audio and speech enhancement, among others, require adaptive and intelligent individualization to achieve best perceptual quality and satisfy personal hearing ability.
Currently, rapid growth of computational ability of personal listening systems increases signal processing power significantly, which makes it feasible to individualize personal sound systems by low system-level computational complexity.